A Christian stand-up comedian walks into a bar. He sucks.
No, it's not the set-up for a lame joke, it's the premise for Crashing (Showcase, Wednesdays at 9pm), a not-at-all-lame comedy-drama written by and starring Pete Holmes, and loosely (or not so loosely) based on his life.
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Trailer: Crashing
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After coming home to discover his wife in bed with her lover, a fictionalised version of Pete Holmes attempts to make a fresh start at his life with the help of his friends.
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Trailer: Crashing
After coming home to discover his wife in bed with her lover, a fictionalised version of Pete Holmes attempts to make a fresh start at his life with the help of his friends.
Pete (Holmes) is a struggling wannabe comedian living in the suburbs with his teacher wife Jess (Lauren Lapkus). He's been doing stand-up for seven years, but he's not very good. He's not making any money from comedy, or anything else. On the up side, at least he's not a flake. He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't do drugs. And he's a Christian. (Did I mention that already?)
Pete comes home one day to find his wife in bed. That's funny, he thinks. Shouldn't you be at work? She tells him she was masturbating, and asks for a bit of privacy to, you know, finish up. Then a naked man emerges from the bathroom. "I'm Leif, brother," he says, dropping the towel that covers his penis as he puts out his hand to shake. "This is a nightmare, but it doesn't have to be."
If there's anything worse than being cuckolded, surely it is being cuckolded by a touchy-feely hippy like Leif (George Basil).
In the blink of an eye, life as Pete has known it is over. He's out of the house, out of the marriage and out on his own. It's all come crashing down.
So he does the only thing he knows how – heads to New York to perform stand-up. Except he doesn't really know how to do that either. He's lousy. The first joke we see him tell is about God. "Why do people always point up at the sky to thank God when they win an award? He's down there as well," he says, pointing at the floor. The gag sinks.
And that's the real subject matter of Crashing: the life of a stand-up comedian before they've learnt to stand up. More like the life of a crawling comedian, a toddler comedian at best.
The comic's life isn't exactly uncharted territory on TV. Think Seinfeld, think Louis. But however scrappy things might be for them offstage, when they're on it, they rule. Pete doesn't. He sucks. (Did I mention that already?)
Pete doesn't even have a place to live. By the end of the first episode, he has somehow befriended a stand-up who's made it to the mid-tier of success, the place that affords four walls, a roof and a couch on which a struggling comedian such as Pete might crash. By the end of the second, he's become pals with another comic, this one a little bit more successful. Even so, he can only offer a bean bag in a room with a wall full of clocks. Tick-tock. At 37, time is surely running out for Pete to make something click.
The real Pete Holmes has been performing since the age of 13. He went to a Christian college, he was married and divorced young (22 and 28 respectively). He did the hard yards on the comedy circuit, including a six-month stint handing out flyers to a comedy club – a scenario that fuels the pretty hilarious fourth episode.
He's not unique in having done it tough, of course. Most comics do, and that's probably why so many of them turn up here in guest roles, playing versions of themselves: Artie Lang, T.J. Miller, Sarah Silverman, to name a few.
Comedy is a road littered with the corpses of fallen jokes, undetonated punch lines, cruel indifference. Crashing steers us along it, guided by Leif's sage, if rather naked, advice: "This is a nightmare, but it doesn't have to be."
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
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